School lunch gets a healthy lesson with new regulations

Students this week may be dreaming of summer days filled with ice cream and lemonade, but cafeteria directors are already thinking about what will fill those students’ plates next fall. MetroWest and Milford area lunch rooms will join school cafeterias across the nation next school year in rolling out new rules to make school meals healthier.

Students this week may be dreaming of summer days filled with ice cream and lemonade, but cafeteria directors are already thinking about what will fill those students’ plates next fall.

MetroWest and Milford area lunch rooms will join school cafeterias across the nation next school year in rolling out new rules to make school meals healthier.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture starting July 1 is phasing in school meal standards.

“We’re going back to the way that school lunch was intended to be,” said Gail Koutroubas, president of the School Nutrition Association of Massachusetts.

Her group is helping districts prepare, training staffs to cook more food from scratch.

New meals, under federal Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act rules, will include more fruits, vegetables and whole grains. The rules stipulate portion sizes and create minimums and maximums for the amount of protein, grains, produce and dairy children can be served.

“The increase in fruits and vegetables on the tray is going to be the biggest impact,” Koutroubas said.

Local nutrition directors are wary of how changes will affect participation and budgets.

“Certainly the intention was good but in practice it’s going to be challenging,” said Lisa Beaudin, Ashland public schools’ director of nutrition services.

Although districts have been phasing in healthier options for years, they still worry children might stop buying lunches or throw those leafy greens in the trash.

“These are young palates, I don’t know how they’re going to accept some of the food items,” said Framingham Director of Food Services Brendan Ryan said.

Knowing the new rules were coming, districts including Framingham have been using “stealth nutrition,” as Ryan calls it, to change those palates.

They sneak brown rice and black beans into favorites like quesadillas, he said.

“Slowly but surely we’ve been adding these things to the menu,” said Milford Food Service Director Carla Tuttle.

She said children like new items such as roasted sweet potatoes and butternut squash.

Milford schools have started putting potato chips in hard-to-reach places on the line, Tuttle said, and will likely get rid of salt shakers next year, she said.

Northborough-Southborough cafeterias do monthly tastings of items such as soy sesame noodles with broccoli, ginger and scallions, a dish that would meet the new standards.

Director Maura Feeley said that dish was such a hit, it landed on the menu immediately.

But like other directors, she worries that the new rules might hurt revenue if children don’t like the extra vegetables they see.

“The last thing I want to do is raise prices,” Ryan said.

Many cafeterias are self-supporting and don’t get money from the school department.

Page 2 of 2 - The rules encourage cafeterias to serve whole meals and fewer a la carte items such as hamburgers and chicken sandwiches, which districts say are big money-makers.

The Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act includes additional stipulations about breakfast and other aspects of school meals that take effect gradually over the next three years.

When schools comply with the new rules, they will be rewarded with an extra 6 cents per meal, the USDA says. But the reimbursements won’t come before October, though the rules take effect this summer.

Meanwhile districts say they will have to spend more to buy higher-quality ingredients such as dark leafy greens, red and orange vegetables and more whole grains.

On Tuttle’s recommendation and in response to the new federal rules, the Milford School Committee last week passed a lunch price hike for elementary and high school students. She said the greater quantity of higher-quality and fresh food will cost more.

Ryan says he already buys 200 flats of strawberries a week, and spends $50,000 a month on fruit.

Beaudin said districts that serve a higher percentage of free and reduced-price lunches will likely have an easier time staying afloat because they receive more government money.

Forty percent of Framingham students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, Ryan said. Thirty percent do in Milford and 12 percent in Ashland, according to the food service directors.

Some districts are closer to compliance with the rules than others and some districts, such as Hopkinton, contract their food to companies such as Aramark, which will have to adjust to the new rules.

Beaudin said children next year will likely ask “where’s the beef?” since protein will be limited to 12 ounces maximum per week in high schools.

That is the minimum now. A chicken breast, for example, is about 6 ounces.

Directors were quick to point out that overhauling the ingredients of school lunch is not the solution to childhood obesity.

“I think the biggest part of this is physical activity in kids in general,” Ryan said, adding that a 22-minute lunch period isn’t healthy, either.

Beaudin said students only eat lunch 178 days a year in the cafeteria, so their impact on childrens’ health is limited.

Koutroubas, of the School Nutrition Association, said the rules follow the “farm-to-table” trend seen at restaurants and farmers markets everywhere.

“Change is not easy … but it’s definitely necessary,” she said.

(Laura Krantz can be reached at 508-626-4429 or lkrantz@wickedlocal.com. Follow her on Twitter @laurakrantzmwdn.)